FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Égalité Is Not Always for Everyone

In the first scenes of ''La Faute à Voltaire,'' Jallel, a young man from Tunisia who has come to France illegally, is coached by a pair of uncles for his interview with an immigration officer. ''Tell them you're Algerian,'' they advise, and urge him to play to the image of France as a beacon of liberty, fraternity and equality, ''the home of Voltaire and all that.''

''They think they invented liberty,'' says one uncle with more than a hint of sarcasm. ''They love human rights.''

Well, they do and they don't. After lying his way through the interview (during which he sits under a poster printed with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man), Jallel is given a temporary visa and finds his way to a homeless shelter. And as Abdel Kechiche's tender film follows Jallel through his daily life in Paris, it expresses its own quiet commitment to the protection of individual dignity and human fraternity.

This is not in the sociological sense a movie about the condition of immigrants in France, but something much more strange and valuable. It's not about sociology but about life, more concerned with telling a story than making a point. There is a point, though, which is that political ideals are embodied not by the impersonal and bureaucratic state (which turns them into rules and procedures), but by people. The film ends with a moment of perfunctory legal cruelty that stands in stark contrast to the warm sense of comradeship that has come before.

Jallel (Sami Bouajila) has a handsome sensitive face and a gentle unassuming manner that draws people to him. At the shelter he falls in with a genial supportive band of outsiders led by a garrulous Breton named Franck (Bruno Lochet).

And one night at a cafe he meets Nassera (Aure Atika), a half-Tunisian waitress and single mother. Their volatile relationship dominates the first half of the film, which ends with Jallel's confinement in a mental hospital.

There he meets Lucie (Elodie Bouchez), who trades sexual favors with the other patients for small sums of money, more out of compulsion than the need for money. Her fragility awakens a protective impulse in Jallel, and once they're discharged from the hospital, she clings to him, sometimes annoying his friends from the shelter.

''La Faute à Voltaire,'' which will be shown tonight and tomorrow in the New Directors New Films festival, is enriched by Mr. Kechiche's discreet and sensitive regard for the emotions of his characters and by the unaffected naturalism of the cast.

The film feels a little too long, and in the second half Jallel's genuine chivalry blurs some of the harder, more interesting edges of his personality. But Mr. Kechiche has a fine and unusual instinct for ordinary beauty, and he introduces us to people we are sorry to leave behind.

LA FAUTE À VOLTAIRE

Directed by Abdel Kechiche; in French, with English subtitles; directors of photography, Dominique Brenguier and Marie-Emmanuelle Spencer; edited by Annick Baly and Tina Baz Legal; production designer, Quentin Prévost; produced by Jean-François Lepetit. Running time: 130 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight at 6 and Tuesday night at 9 at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, as part of the 30th New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the department of film of the Museum of Modern Art.